Tetris

Tetris

In 1997 or so my single parent family was given a Macintosh Classic II by someone who had upgraded to a better computer and this became our first home computer. It was black and white and it had one game on it that I played incessantly, GO! I'm not sure if Henk was involved with that version of the software, but it was one that I loved dearly. In 1999 I received a Windows 3.1 as a hand-me down from my soon to be ex-stepfather who had a PhD in computer science. He killed it one day trying to upgrade it and I painstakingly combed through books that explained commands that I could use to communicate to the computer and I eventually got it running again as an 8 year old when I was told the thing was toast. I was hooked and video games became a lifelong passion for me, as I played hours and hours of shareware games like the platformer Duke Nukem and Commander Keen.

In 2001, after having lived in a motel for months (after having been on the run from this stepfather by staying in friends' homes and being homeless while thankfully never going without shelter) we moved into this mice and cockroach hole that was eventually torn down. It had no air conditioning or swamp cooler and we would lay out on the tile floor for hours in the 106 degree F (41+ degrees C) weather and just try to daydream. Our new neighbors were immigrants from Mexico and in the evenings we would play marbles and they would graciously give me some here and there because I didn't have any. Here's where my memory gets foggy and there are two equally possible scenarios, both rooted in truth, but I'm not sure the circumstances or how the items involved ended up in my possession. I will tell a possibly incorrect story, but the best one I can tell. I was enrolled in the elementary school there and one day on my way home I saw a gray block of something caked in mud. This could have been in a field, in the gutter, or even while I was playing back in the development behind our neighbor's home, I can't remember. What I do remember is wondering if someone had lost it. I think I took it home because there was nobody to try and turn it in to and it had very obviously been where I found it for a long time.

I cleaned up this old thing (I think it may have had corrosion initially on the battery springs), but I didn't have anything to play on it. I showed it to my neighbor friends and one of them handed me their old copy of Tetris (everyone already had much nicer Gameboy Colors or were waiting for a Gameboy Advance). I had played Tetris quite a bit on dollar store knockoff handhelds with my sister (and on our hand-me down NES that we got around the same time as the Mac but at this time was dying and was also heavily regulated by my mother), but this was the real deal, the one packaged with the gray brick I had rescued, and privately mine. I played it relentlessly and for hours. I could play it by the light of my window and outside of the curfews of my mom. With all the turmoil in my early life with abusive parents, siblings, bullies, constant moves (I went to ten different schools by tenth grade) and mostly a collection of toys from kids meals, video games, movies, books, and my ideas of comic book characters helped me to escape from the hell I lived in every day. It's why I am so connected to stories like this. This film is obviously poetic license and ra ra ra America to the umpteenth degree, but as an immigrant myself, I want the hope of a better life. Video games helped me to cope until I got there, and this is in part the story of that, even in mythos form. Politicians and corporations are the enemy, but quite often their creations founded in greed are snatched up by the poor at some point and help make life bearable. Guess I'm just a sucker for capitalism, despite its many many faults.

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